JICS was established in 1991 through the UT Science Alliance Center of Excellence and ORNL. It serves researchers from UT, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and private industry who utilize parallel computing by combining resources of UT and ORNL. In August 2002 ground was broken for a 52,000-square-foot building, funded by the State of Tennessee and owned by UT, to house the Joint Institute for Computational Sciences and the Oak Ridge Center for Advanced Studies. ORCAS, comparable to the Santa Fe Institute and the Aspen Institute, was designed to bring together some of the greatest minds in the world to work on scientific challenges that are too big for any single laboratory or university. The building was completed in May 2004.
At about the same time as the building’s dedication, the US Department of Energy announced that the world’s largest supercomputer, the National Leadership Computing Facility, would be built at ORNL. The JICS facility is near the National Institute for Computational Sciences (NICS), funded by the National Science Foundation and managed by the University of Tennessee. The mission of NICS is to enable the scientific discoveries of researchers nationwide by providing leading-edge computational resources, together with support for their effective use, and leveraging extensive partnership opportunities. UT’s Cray XT5 supercomputer, Kraken, was funded by a $65 million National Science Foundation in 2007 and underwent several upgrades before being decommissioned in 2014.
In 2009 the National Science Foundation awarded UT a four-year, $10 million grant to develop a computer to process the vast amounts of data generated by the current system of the NSF’s computers around the United States. The supercomputer Nautilus was housed in the Joint Institute for Computational Sciences, sharing its home with Kraken, the world’s fastest academic supercomputer. But while Kraken was devoted to running simulation applications, Nautilus was to serve to analyze vast amounts of scientific data. UT’s Center for Remote Data Analysis and Visualization was formed to utilize Nautilus to amass and analyze enormous quantities of data through the use of scientific sensors or other intricate computer software. Nautilus was to organize and interpret information that other supercomputers gathered, so that an incomprehensible amount of complex data could be expressed as more accessible and applicable results. Nautilus was initially designed to have 1,024 core processors and four terabytes of shared memory.
The JICS building received LEED Silver certification May 27, 2005. Dr. Thom Dunning, a computational chemist, was named the first director of JICS in 2002.